Sunil Sethi: A Nepali's elegy for democracy

AL FRESCO

It is not only geography that produces fault-lines; some may seem to be built into history and human nature.

It was Karl Marx who famously said that "history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce." Anyone observing recent events in Nepal, from the royal massacre in the summer of 2001 to the dismissal of the elected government by King Gyanendra last month, may wonder at the veracity of the Marxian edict.

But watching from a safe distance is not the same thing as being part of the scene, of living and scrutinising history at the same time.

Growing up in Nepal in the 1970s, writes Manjushree Thapa, in her remarkable new book Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (Penguin Viking; pages: 260; price: Rs 350) under the patriarchy""the so-called panchayat form of government that King Birendra inherited from his father King Mahendra""was a cloak-and-dagger business, hushed by palace intrigue.

"... We instinctively lowered our voices when we spoke of the government ... so unsafe that people feel expressing dissent, we developed layers and layers of personae ... our beliefs seemed to shift and alter and mutate as we perfected the art of dissembling ... What we lost was the habit of seeking out the truth."

Birendra (the "well-meaning simpleton", "the placid pot-head") came to a bloody end, gunned down by his enraged son Dipendra, in the massacre at Narayanhiti Palace.

It is a dramatic start to the Nepal story and Thapa tells it well, with the dispassionate analysis of a skilful reporter underpinned by the emotional tension of a concerned citizen; but then she goes backward and forward in time, bringing her country's blood-soaked history alive. It starts with a simple walk through the national museum in Kathmandu: the skeletons come tumbling out of the exhibits of history, the cycle of regicides and murderous feuds between the Nepal's ruling Shah dynasty, and the Rana prime ministers, who virtually held them prisoner mid-way into the 20th century.

When one Shumshere Bahadur Jung Rana died of natural causes, it was Thapa muses, a form of progress: " to have rulers die of natural causes instead of murder".

Nepal's experiments with democracy were similarly plagued by the interminable squabbles of the Koirala brothers: there were nine short-lived governments between 1951 and 1960.

But the trouble between the endlessly splintering Nepali Congress and Communist parties was that control among three ruling castes remained unassailable and constitutional reform remained subservient to the supremacy of the king.

The majority had no voice: "Development was (King Birendra's) his excuse for doing away with democracy ... It was as though the Nepali people had not found a place in the country's history."

Even the people's movement of the 1990s solved little: 40 per cent of Nepalis below the poverty line, rampant discrimination against dalits, ethnic minorities and women that "forced millions of Nepalis to lead desperate lives, or to leave the country to find work abroad, in India or further afield ..."

As King Birendra fiddled and G P Koirala squeezed communist strongholds, the left-liberal alliance collapsed in a climate of widespread political division and corruption.

The time was ripe, the stage set for a new reign of terror unleashed by Maoist insurgents ...

Manjushree Thapa is the best kind of chronicler because she breaks down conventional modes of how history should be recorded: she acts, by turns, as reporter, activist, analyst and archivist, employing the techniques of each discipline.

What makes Forget Kathmandu unforgettable is its courageous personal voice. Moved by a desire to find out what went wrong with her country, a place that outsiders often regard as an escapist Shangri-la, Thapa is both passionately involved and coolly sardonic: "As we grew up, it became obvious that we were not a peace-loving Hindu nation of poor but happy villagers smiling for the benefit of passing trekkers."

Thapa calls her book "a mongrel of historiography, reportage, travel writing and journal writing.

You could call it," she adds, "a book on bad politics." But that is, in fact, its greatest strength. It is all of the above and it carries the brutal message that bad politics will endanger us all.